Abstract [en]

This Letter reports a measurement of the high-mass Drell-Yan differential cross-section in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV at the LHC. Based on an integrated luminosity of 4.9 fb(-1), the differential cross-section in the Z/gamma* -> e(+)e(-) channel is measured with the ATLAS detector as a function of the invariant mass, m(ee), in the range 116 < m(ee) < 1500 GeV, for a fiducial region in which both the electron and the positron have transverse momentum p(T) > 25 GeV and pseudorapidity vertical bar n vertical bar < 2.5. A comparison is made to various event generators and to the predictions of perturbative QCD calculations at next-to-next-to-leading order.